Relaxing cross-legged in his Paris apartment, with his crew cut, bare feet, and black fatigues, sun-tanned Emmanuel Carrère could be a guerrilla commander at a ceasefire, or a colonel in the French Foreign Legion enjoying some metropolitan R&R. In fact, he's the best kind of writer, not just a bestseller but a man who is not afraid to leave the comfort zone of his desk, go out into the world, take risks, and get his shoes dirty. According to the Paris Review, "There are few great writers in France today, and Emmanuel Carrère is one of them."

Monday, September 29, 2014

Brigitte Bardot

Influence on Fashion

Brigitte Bardot is one of my favourite actress. For me she is personification of femininity.

She was "fashion-revolutionary" and " Many Thanks" her for that! =)

In fashion the Bardot neckline (a wide open neck that exposes both shoulders) is named after her. Bardot popularized this style which is especially used for knitted sweaters or jumpers although it is also used for other tops and dresses.

Bardot is recognized for popularizing bikini swimwear in early films such asManina(Woman without a Veil, 1952), in her appearances at Cannes and in many photo shoots.

Bardot also brought into fashion thechoucroute("Sauerkraut") hairstyle (a sort of beehive hair style) and gingham clothes after wearing a checkered pink dress, designed by Jacques Esterel. She was subject for an Andy Warhol painting.

I really wanted to die at certain periods in my life. Death was like love, a romantic escape. I took pills because I didn't want to throw myself off my balcony and know people would photograph me lying dead below.

Friday, September 26, 2014

Since her first public appearance in 1950, BB, the screen icon who turned her back on film fame, has courted scandal

by Agnès Poirier

The Observer, Saturday 20 September 2014

Brigitte Bardot in 1965. Photograph: Alamy

The woman Paris-Match deemed "immoral, from head to toe" in 1958, is turning 80 in a few days. "The most beautiful woman in the world" may have chosen to leave the limelight in 1973, at the peak of her fame and beauty, to dedicate her life to animals, yet Brigitte Bardot has never ceased to be a controversial figure.

ROYAL FAMILY

A new life for King Juan Carlos

After giving up the throne, Spain’s former monarch seems keen to maintain an informal public role

Juan Carlos arrives in Bogota to attend the inauguration of President Juan Manuel Santos. / JOHN VIZCAINO (REUTERS)

Since abdicating on June 19 in favor of his son Felipe, Juan Carlos de Borbón has spent the summer putting together the details for a foundation that will bear his name. Sources close to the 76-year-old say he has no plans to retire fully from public life, and intends to remain active.

The Zarzuela Palace, the official residence of the Spanish monarchy, has little to say about the former head of state’s activities, pointing out that he no longer has official duties. However, on August 7 Juan Carlos did travel to Colombia for the presidential inauguration of Juan Manuel Santos, standing in for his son, who in recent years had already taken over a growing number of such appearances on behalf of his father.

Juan Carlos’s exit from public view has even prompted speculation over his health, as well as rumors, which started in the Italian press, that he was to divorce his wife Sofía and marry 49-year-old socialite Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, who continues to use her German former husband’s aristocratic title. Her “friendship” with the former king was made public after it was discovered that she had accompanied him on an ill-fated hunting trip to Botswana in 2012, when he broke his hip.

The race to save Mexico’s dying languages

The country’s wealth of 68 indigenous tongues is almost unmatched anywhere else

When Fidel Hernández goes back to his home village of Chicahuatxla, the houses suddenly sprout mouths, eyes and backs. There is nothing odd about this. It happens automatically every time the bus emerges out of the Mexico City sprawl and heads down south to his native state of Oaxaca.

At this point Fidel, a PhD student at UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, leaves behind the doors, windows and ceilings of the Spanish language and steps into the universe ofTriqui,a tonal language of which there are 25,883 speakers, according to the official count.

Triquiis part of what might be Mexico’s greatest yet least-known treasure: its linguistic diversity. The country is home to 11 linguistic families that branch out into 68 languages, which in turn have 364 dialects. Such a profusion of tongues is to be found nowhere else in the world save for Papua New Guinea, Brazil and parts of Africa.

But this diversity is in grave danger of extinction.Barely seven million indigenous people actively use their own languages, and most are speakers of Náhuatl, Yucatecan Maya, Mixteco, Tseltal, Zapoteco andTsotsil. Out of 364 existing dialects, 259 are likely to disappear, according to the National Institute of Indigenous Languages.

Some indigenous languages may be saved because of their geographical isolation

In many cases, the languages are doomed: 64 of them have fewer than a hundred speakers.

One of these is Manuel Segovia Jiménez, a 79-year-old peasant from Ayapa, in the state of Tabasco. Don Manuel, who gets up at 5am and works out in the fields until 2pm, is one of just seven speakers ofNnumteOote, the “true language,” also known as Ayapaneco. It is the most endangered language in Mexico. He is the only person who continues to use it at home on a daily basis.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

20 years on, John Banville returns to the Czech Republic's most famous fictional export, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

by John BanvilleThe Guardian, Saturday 1 May 2004

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, translated by Michael Henry Heim 314 pp, Faber.

Returning after 20 years to what is acknowledged as a modern classic, I was struck by how little I remembered. As I began re-reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera's novel of love and politics in communist-run Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the early 1980s, I realised that, true to its title, the book had floated out of my mind like a hot-air balloon come adrift from its tethers. I managed to retrieve a few fragments - the naked woman in the bowler hat whom we all remember, the death of a pet dog, a lavatory seat compared to a white water lily rising out of the bathroom floor, and the fact that Nietzsche's name appears in the first line on the first page - but of the characters I retained nothing at all, not even their names.

Monday, September 22, 2014

Milan Kundera

End of exile

Paul Webster

The Observer, Sunday 4 May 2003

The Paris-based author Milan Kundera has finally got over a fit of pique and published his novel, L'Ignorance, in France, a work he wrote in French three years ago. The Czech-born author, at odds with the critics, refused to release the book here until translations had triumphed in bestseller lists in 26 countries, although Czechoslavakia has also been deprived of his insight into the problems of expatriation because of resentment over the way he is treated in his homeland.

Kundera, who emigrated from Prague aged 36 in 1975, spent the better part of 20 years perfecting his written French before publishing his two previous books, La Lenteur - slowness - and L'Identité here. Miffed by lack of overwhelming praise, after ecstatic reviews for works translated from Czech, he still won't speak to French critics and literary interviewers, not even the best known of them, Bernard Pivot, whose TV debates on L'Apostrophe sealed Kundera's reputation when he arrived virtually unknown in France.

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Milan Kundera

The Art of Fiction No. 81

Interviewed by Christian Salmon

Summer 1984The Paris Review No. 92

This interview is a product of several encounters with Milan Kundera in Paris in the fall of 1983. Our meetings took place in his attic apartment near Montparnasse. We worked in the small room that Kundera uses as his office. With its shelves full of books on philosophy and musicology, an old-fashioned typewriter and a table, it looks more like a student’s room than like the study of a world-famous author. On one of the walls, two photographs hang side by side: one of his father, a pianist, the other of Leoš Janácek, a Czech composer whom he greatly admires.

Saturday, September 20, 2014

My favourite Bond film: From Russia With Love

Sean Connery's 1963 outing to Istanbul may look grainy now, but his exchanges with Robert Shaw have lost none of their edge

Posted by Peter BradshawThe Guardian, Monday 24 September 2012

From Russia With Love is my favourite James Bond movie, simply because it is the first Bond I ever saw at the cinema. This was at the old Classic in Hendon Central in London, some time in the early 1970s, in an era before Bond films were shown on television, and going to see them at the cinema was a special school-holiday treat. Quite long-in-the-tooth Bond films would be revived on the big screen like this: this was a double bill of From Russia With Love (1963) and Thunderball (1965).

What a thrill to hear that incredible theme tune played live (as it were) for the first time, echoing around the cavernous old cinema and seeing those opening titles: the mysterious circle shunting across the dark screen, Bond walking in profile, turning dramatically face on and firing, the descending curtain of blood. It was like a bad dream or expressionist ballet. Perhaps nothing in any 007 film can ever match the heart-racing thrill of Monty Norman's inspired Bond theme. That was the 007 brand, right there. Then it was time for the title-sequence itself, a fantastically silly image of a belly-dancer on whom the titles were ripplingly projected. To my saucer-eyed 12-year-old self, this was the grownup world as it was meant to be: erotic, exotic, mysterious and dangerous. Actually, it is a Raymond Revuebar vision of adult sophistication.

"Oh James, James, will you make love to me all the time in England?" - Tatiana

After a period of being tucked away on Sky, the James Bond films are back where they're supposed to be – filling up huge swathes of the ITV weekend schedule until it's time to show all the Harry Potter films in order again. This is undoubtedly a good thing. James Bond is as much a part of ITV as Ant and Dec and those upsettingly sexually aggressive e-cigarette adverts. So, to welcome him back, here's a recap of 007's second cinematic outing, From Russia With Love.

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Beautiful Portraits of The First Bond Girl,

Linda Christian in 1945

Linda Christian was a Mexican-born, United States-based film actress, who appeared in Mexican and Hollywood films. Her career reached its peak in the 1940s and 1950s. She played Mara in the last Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan film, Tarzan and The Mermaids (1948). She is also noted for being the first Bond girl, appearing in a 1954 television adaptation of the James Bond novel Casino Royale. In 1963 she starred in an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, "An Out for Oscar".

Here are beautiful portraits of Linda Christian taken by Bob Landry in 1945.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Daniel Craig

Bond Ambition

As he makes his third appearance as 007, in the 23rd James Bond film, Daniel Craig is coming to terms with the extraordinary pressures of portraying a half-century-old icon. He even agrees that Bond needs to lighten up. Hearing how the reluctant actor was drawn into the franchise, Juli Weiner reveals the influence Craig has had on next month’s Skyfall—from character development and dazzling stuntwork to the choice of director Sam Mendes. But don’t ask to see his blooper reel.

GEORGE LAZENBY CALLS SHOTGUN Daniel Craig, photographed in a vintage Aston Martin, in New York City.

Among the great lost works of modern cinema is The Day the Clown Cried, Jerry Lewis’s 1972 film about a clown who entertains children at a Nazi concentration camp. Screened in an incomplete version by only a few movie-business insiders over the past several decades, it is perhaps the most famous unreleased film in history.

Cinema historians haven’t yet crowned a most famous unseen DVD extra in history, and so we humbly submit for future consideration: the blooper reel for Skyfall, the 23rd official film in the James Bond series and the third starring Daniel Craig as 007. This is not a movie from whose blooper reel one would expect great things—indeed, it is not a movie one would assume would even have a blooper reel. (What would it contain? Co-star Dame Judi Dench screaming obscenities? Craig tripping and splitting his Tom Ford pants?) But according to Craig himself, an honest-to-God blooper reel was shown to the cast and crew at Skyfall’s wrap party.

“I mean, Judi is always hilarious,” said Craig one muggy summer morning over a cappuccino at New York’s Crosby Street Hotel. “There’s a lot of very, very funny moments. But no one’s going to see them. It’s what happens on a film set. You want to be in film? Get a job.” Despite his somewhat dour reputation, Craig finished this statement with a rapturously conspiratorial giggle—the kind of laugh two friends might emit upon sharing a bitchy secret about a mutual friend who just walked into the room.

I’m one lucky bastard. During my early acting years I was told that to succeed you needed personality, talent and luck in equal measure. I contest that. For me it’s been 99% luck. It’s no good being talented and not being in the right place at the right time.